The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  So what was Stalin thinking? What did he know and when did he know it?

  Hitler was blinded by his burning conviction that Germany had to defeat and subjugate the Soviet Union, a country that he contemptuously dismissed as “a Slavic-Tartar body” with “a Jewish head.” But Stalin was suffering from a different kind of blindness, willful disbelief of the staggering amount of evidence that Hitler was about to unleash his forces against him. The fact that German troops would then get as close as they did to seizing Moscow was a direct consequence of the Soviet leader’s refusal to see what he didn’t want to see during the nearly two-year period of the Nazi-Soviet alliance.

  There are no easy answers to the question of why Stalin behaved the way he did, ignoring warnings from his own intelligence agents and from the West, though there are some plausible, hotly contested theories. The record of those years shows that, without a doubt, Stalin had all the information he needed to reach the correct conclusion and prepare his country for the attack that was coming rather than assume that he still had time for a lengthy period of preparation or that the attack might not come at all. But again and again, Stalin would insist on his version of events, allowing his wishes to overcome his reason and, in his mind, to represent reality.

  Curiously, it initially appeared that the Kremlin brass were more the realists than their German counterparts. At the time of the Munich Pact in 1938, Stalin had expressed his frustration with Britain’s Neville Chamberlain for his refusal to recognize the folly of his policy of appeasement. “One day that madman Hitler will grab his umbrella and hit him with it. And Chamberlain will take it without complaining,” he said. It wasn’t just Stalin’s contempt for Chamberlain that is revealing here; it’s also his casual use of the term “madman.” Along with occasional flashes of grudging admiration, that sort of disdain for Hitler and his entourage was commonplace in the Kremlin.

  Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s fearsome secret police chief, mocked Ribbentrop by saying, “He struts around like a turkey puffed up with pride.” While imprisoned in Nuremberg at the end of the war, Ribbentrop, for his part, declared, “I rather liked Stalin and Molotov, got along fine with them.” In fact, several members of Hitler’s inner circle expressed respect for Stone Bottom, as Molotov was known among his comrades because of his ability to sit working as long as the boss required. During his interrogation at Nuremberg, Hitler’s translator Paul Schmidt offered this assessment of Molotov: “He reminded me of my old teacher of mathematics. He’s the type of man who makes sure to cross his t’s and dot his i’s. He likes meticulousness. He is a legal expert, a hard worker, and rather stubborn. But I don’t know if he has much imagination. Like all Russians he will obey Stalin’s orders unwaveringly.” In other words, Molotov and Ribbentrop were alike in their slavish devotion to their respective tyrants.

  In assessing the British, Soviet officials certainly sounded more prescient than the Germans. When Ribbentrop visited Moscow to conclude the nonaggression pact, he held conversations with Stalin, who warned him, “England, despite its weakness, will wage war craftily and stubbornly.” To be sure, Stalin would be proved wrong on another prediction: that the French would put up a stiff fight as well. But at least as far as the British were concerned, the Soviets exhibited a far more healthy respect for their determination and fighting abilities than the Germans did. In November 1940, Molotov was attending a banquet in his honor in Berlin when the RAF attacked the city, forcing his hosts to retreat with him to Ribbentrop’s bunker. When the German foreign minister insisted that Britain was finished, the normally dour Molotov delivered his best riposte ever. “If that’s so, then why are we in this shelter and whose bombs are those falling?” he asked.

  But if Stalin and other top Soviet officials sometimes came out on top in their rhetorical sparring with the Germans, they acted as if they could really rely on their nonaggression pact and other agreements to keep the peace between the two countries—at least for a good long while. Stalin was determined to honor his trade commitments to Germany throughout the period of the pact, and his country provided huge amounts of oil, wood, copper, manganese ore, rubber, grain, and other supplies to keep the German military machine well stocked. The more warnings Stalin received that he was only strengthening a military power that was about to turn against him, the more he insisted on keeping those commitments, ensuring prompt deliveries so that Hitler wouldn’t have any suspicion that Stalin might be suspicious of him. As Khrushchev put it, “So while those sparrows kept chirping, ‘Look out for Hitler! Look out for Hitler!’ Stalin was punctually sending the Germans trainload after trainload of grain and petroleum. He wanted to butter up Hitler by living up to the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact!”

  Among the best “sparrows” were many of the Soviet Union’s spies abroad. As early as June 1940, when Germany was moving swiftly through France, Colonel Ivan Dergachev, the Soviet military attaché in Bulgaria, sent a report from a source who predicted the conclusion of an armistice with France and then “within a month’s time” a sudden attack on the Soviet Union. “The purpose would be to destroy communism in the Soviet Union and to create a fascist regime there,” he wrote. On June 22, France was forced to conclude an armistice with Germany, and, while the actual invasion was still a year off, a month later Hitler was telling his generals to begin preparing for an attack on Russia.

  The Soviet military intelligence service delivered a steady stream of reports from its sources that warned of war preparations. From Berlin, a source code-named Ariets reported on September 29, 1940, that Hitler intended to “resolve problems in the east in the spring of next year.” On December 29, the same source predicted an attack in March 1941. In February 1941, he reported confirmation “that war has definitely been decided on for this year.” Major General Vasily Tupikov, who as military attaché was in charge of this intelligence gathering, agreed with that assessment and noted that Germany was decreasing its troop deployments in the west and shifting them to the border with the Soviet Union. “The U.S.S.R. figures as the next enemy,” he concluded. On May 9, he added details of a German war plan. As he summarized it, “Defeat of the Red Army will be complete in one or one and a half months with arrival of the German Army on the meridian of Moscow.”

  Other Soviet military missions delivered similar bad news. On March 13, 1941, Bucharest quoted a German major as saying, “We have completely changed our plan. We will move to the east against the U.S.S.R. We will obtain grain, coal, and oil from the U.S.S.R. and that will enable us to continue the war against England and America.” According to one Bucharest source, “The German military are drunk with their successes and claim that war with the U.S.S.R. will begin in May.” On March 26, Bucharest added that “the Romanian general staff has precise information that in two or three months Germany will attack the Ukraine.” The report added that the attack also would be aimed at the Baltic states, and that Romania would participate in the war and be rewarded with Bessarabia, the border territory that Stalin had seized from it. The mission went on to report the four-week delay of German plans because of the action against Yugoslavia and Greece and the growing confidence of the German military that it would defeat the Soviet Union in a matter of weeks.

  But Stalin’s reaction—and increasingly that of the men he put in charge of sifting through this growing body of intelligence—was to dismiss it. First of all, Stalin rid himself of Ivan Proskurov, the head of Soviet military intelligence, who had consistently refused to buckle under the pressure to deliver better news. He replaced him with Filipp Golikov, who began relying on the reports of those of his officers who were clearly picking up German disinformation. In March 1941, for instance, the Soviet military attaché in Budapest, who had no credible sources, dismissed all talk of a German invasion as English propaganda. “Everyone considers that at the present time a German offensive against the U.S.S.R. is unthinkable before the defeat of England,” he reported.

  Golikov endorsed those conclusions. “Rumors and documents tha
t speak of the inevitability of war against the U.S.S.R. this spring must be assessed as disinformation emanating from English and even perhaps from German intelligence,” he maintained. There’s little doubt why he was responding in this way. On April 17, when his Prague station sent a report predicting that “Hitler will attack the U.S.S.R. in the second half of June,” Golikov dutifully sent it on to Stalin. Within three days, it landed back on Golikov’s desk with Stalin’s note in red ink: “English provocation! Investigate!”

  But no one angered Stalin more than Richard Sorge, the Soviet master spy in Tokyo, who delivered report after report to his superiors in military intelligence that was right on target. Born in Baku of a Russian mother and a German father, Sorge was raised in Germany, recruited by the Comintern, and moved to Tokyo as the German correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung. To all appearances a dedicated Nazi, he ingratiated himself with the German ambassador and his staff and with senior Japanese officials. Taking advantage of this unrivaled access to inside information, he was among the first to report in late 1940 that an attack on the U.S.S.R. was likely, and he offered chapter and verse on German troop movements eastward. He warned that “the Germans could occupy territory on a line Kharkov, Moscow, Leningrad.” But as he continued to provide more evidence for his claims, Golikov’s main response was to cut back on his expenses, which Sorge correctly characterized as “a kind of punishment.” When Sorge reported in May that an attack was imminent, Stalin dismissed him as “a little shit who has set himself up with some small factories and brothels in Japan.”

  The NKVD’s foreign intelligence operatives encountered similar reactions when they produced reports that paralleled those of their military counterparts. One of their best sources was Harro Schulze-Boysen, code-named Starshina, who worked in the German Air Ministry. He consistently kept them up to date, in considerable detail, about preparations for the invasion. On June 17, he warned that everything was ready and that “the blow can be expected at any time.” Stalin’s response: Starshina should be sent back to “his fucking mother.”

  Stepan Mikoyan, a fighter pilot during the war and the son of Anastas, offers a straightforward explanation of Stalin’s refusal to believe his agents. “Stalin’s attitude to intelligence data reflected his extreme distrust of people. In his opinion everyone was capable of deceit or treason.” In his memoirs, the younger Mikoyan mentions that Stalin ordered a recall of his resident agents from abroad so that, in Stalin’s words, he could “grind them into dust in the camps.”

  Given Stalin’s suspicions, it’s hardly surprising that he also dismissed Western warnings that Hitler was about to turn against him. In April 1941, both Laurence Steinhardt, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, and Winston Churchill attempted to point this out—to no avail. Other attempts, particularly by the British, to alert the Kremlin to the significance of German troop movements in preparation for the invasion proved equally ineffective. As Stalin saw it, those warnings were all meant to sow discord between Moscow and Berlin, with the ultimate objective of turning one against the other. “They’re playing us off against each other,” he complained.

  If Stalin’s pathological distrust of his own agents and the West was hardly surprising, it’s harder to explain his blindness to so many other signals of Hitler’s intentions. As far back as August 14, 1940, Hitler dropped a clear hint by requesting a schedule of Soviet deliveries for the period “until the spring of 1941.” And in the run-up to the invasion, the Germans were steadily recalling diplomats and their families from the embassy in Moscow. By the time of the attack, the German presence had been reduced to just over a hundred people. As Valentin Berezhkov, who was serving in the Soviet embassy in Berlin, pointed out, the equivalent number for the Soviet side was about a thousand people. “Stalin, concerned about making Hitler suspicious, had forbade us from reducing the numbers of our employees in Germany,” he wrote.

  Then there were all the signs of military preparations, easily observable, especially in the border regions. With increasing frequency, German planes flew into Soviet air space, clearly on reconnaissance missions. After several instances of Soviet border troops opening fire or Soviet planes attempting to scramble to intercept them, and even one incident in which five German planes landed in Soviet territory and claimed they had lost their way before running out of fuel, Stalin’s impulse was to restrict the actions of his own troops. “In case of violations of the German-Soviet border by German aircraft or balloons, do not open fire,” NKVD Directive 102 on March 29, 1940, ruled: “Limit yourselves to preparing a report on the violation of the state frontier.” On April 5, another order from Beria informed the border troops that, in the case of any confrontations, they should “strictly see to it that bullets do not fall on German territory.”

  The Germans offered the lame explanation that the frequent overflights were a result of the fact that several military flight schools were located near the border. As the number of such incidents kept growing (between April 19 and June 19, 1941, there were 180 of them), the Soviet response became increasingly groveling. An official note assured the German government that border troops had been instructed not to fire on its planes “so long as such flights did not occur frequently.” After he received one of the many reports about German overflights, Stalin declared: “I’m not sure Hitler knows about those flights.”

  Stalin’s efforts to assure the Germans that, no matter what actions they took, he wanted to maintain good relations reached almost comical proportions—if not for the fact that the stakes were so high. On April 18, 1941, the Soviet leader was seeing off Japanese Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka at a Moscow railway station, in itself an unusual event, when he practically begged the German diplomats on the platform to believe his protestations of eternal friendship. Spotting German ambassador Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, he threw his arms around him and proclaimed, “We must remain friends and you must now do everything to that end!” A little later when he saw Colonel Hans Krebs, the German military attaché, he first checked that he indeed was German and repeated his message: “We will remain friends with you in any event.”

  Stalin’s efforts impressed Schulenburg, an aristocrat who was singularly unperceptive in his observations of both the Soviet Union and the new leader of his own country. When he reassured the wife of the American ambassador at a party in early 1941 that Russia and Germany wouldn’t go to war with each other, he almost certainly believed it. Later he began to recognize that he had been misreading the signals, but he kept trying to convince his superiors in Berlin that they should take Stalin’s appeals for continued cooperation seriously. “I honestly believe that in realizing how serious the international situation is, Stalin has made himself personally responsible for preserving the U.S.S.R. from a conflict with Germany,” he argued.

  But as Goebbels noted in his diary, the Nazi leaders intentionally kept Schulenburg in the dark about the war preparations and were happy to have him still act as though there was a serious chance of avoiding a military confrontation. Goebbels asserted that the ambassador “hadn’t the faintest idea that the Reich was determined to attack” while he kept pressing the campaign to keep Stalin an ally. “There is no doubt that one does best if one keeps the diplomats uninformed about the background of politics,” the propaganda chief wrote. “They must sometimes play a role for which they don’t have the necessary theatrical abilities, and even if they did possess them, they would undoubtedly act an appeasement role more convincingly and play the finer nuances more genuinely, if they themselves were believers in appeasement.”

  As for Stalin, he played his appeasement role so convincingly that the Turkish ambassador in Moscow sent a dispatch to his home office, which was intercepted by the Germans, portraying Stalin as willing to do almost anything to convince Hitler he genuinely wanted peace. “Stalin is about to become a blind tool of Germany,” he reported. The question is whether Stalin was just playing a role or acting out of genuine conviction.

  The standa
rd defense of Stalin is that he did what he had to do, playing for time because of the weakness of the West and the need to prepare his own forces. According to that line of reasoning, the Soviet leader was under no illusions about Hitler’s ultimate intentions. “To argue that we did not expect a German attack is just plain stupid, particularly coming from military people who were close to the general staff,” Khrushchev maintained, certainly with more of an eye to protecting his own reputation as part of Stalin’s inner circle than to protecting the boss himself. “No one with an ounce of political sense should buy the idea that we were fooled, that we were caught flat-footed by a treacherous surprise assault.”

  But the Kremlin leadership—and, as a result, many of its troops—were in fact caught flat-footed when the invasion started. Take the question of the country’s defensive lines. In the 1930s, heavily fortified lines were built along the Soviet Union’s western borders. But when those borders were moved further west as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Stalin decided that the old fortifications should be largely abandoned and new ones should be constructed along the new dividing line between Germany and the Soviet Union.

  This turned out to be a disastrous decision. Petro Grigorenko, who as a young soldier had helped build the original fortifications, recalled that in the spring of 1941 Stalin ordered the destruction of many of the old fortifications and “tens of thousands” of them were blown up. “I do not know how future historians will explain this crime against our people,” the future general—who would become a dissident—wrote later. “No better gift could have been given to Hitler’s Barbarossa plan. How could this have taken place? Stalin’s justification must be that he was insane.”